Four approaches, not four rankings
People searching for an Examen app usually want something more specific than they can name on the first attempt. One question settles most of it: do you want to be led, do you want a library, or do you want to see your own way?
If you want the book, in app form: Reimagining the Examen
From Loyola Press, based on Mark Thibodeaux SJ's book of the same name. It offers a set of Examen variations — different ways into the same prayer, depending on the kind of day you have had — and you pick one each evening.
It fits you if you already know the Examen and want the variety of a well-made book without carrying the book. It is a set of meditations rather than a place where your own answers accumulate.
If you want to be led by voice: Pray as you go, Sacred Space
Pray as you go comes from the Jesuits in Britain, Sacred Space from the Irish Jesuits. Both are free, both without advertising, both excellent, and both far older than the current wave of prayer apps.
The core is a daily session of roughly ten to fifteen minutes with music, the day's scripture and guided questions; the weekly review takes the place of the daily reading at the end of the week.
They fit you if you would rather listen than write, if you want structure given to you from outside, and if a weekly review is enough.
If you want a library: Hallow
The largest Catholic prayer app, with an enormous range: rosary, novenas, the Bible in a year, sleep prayers, music, seasonal challenges, and guided Examen meditations among them. There is a trial period, then a subscription.
Breadth is the strength. The price of breadth is that the Examen is one section among dozens rather than the centre, and in recent versions personalisation and AI features have moved closer to the middle of the product.
It fits you if you are looking for a prayer library and like being carried by what is on offer.
If you want to see your own way: Lumen
Lumen does one thing: the daily Examen, in seven steps, every evening. Instead of reading to you, it listens — you write or dictate, and what you write stays.
That produces what the other approaches cannot: patterns over time. After a few weeks it becomes visible which situations keep producing the same narrowness, and where things reliably come apart. The confession preparation is built from exactly that — not from a list of separate incidents, but from the root underneath them.
Around it sit the further Ignatian pieces: the rules for discernment, the Exercises in daily life, the Election after Exx 169–189, and the Particular Examen.
It fits you if you pray daily, want to be accompanied over months, and care that your notes belong to you.
The question that comes before the features
An Examen is not a podcast subscription. Anyone who prays it honestly writes down things they tell nobody else. Before you start writing anywhere, settle three points:
- Where does the text live? On the device, or on a server? Encrypted, or readable by the provider?
- Is an account required? An account means there is a row somewhere with your name next to it.
- Is your behaviour analysed? Some providers personalise recommendations from what you do in the app. That may be harmless in a music service. In a prayer life it is a decision that deserves to be made on purpose.
Lumen answers those three the same way it always has: everything stays encrypted on your own device, there is no account and no server, and there is no AI — not in the journal, not anywhere. That is a deliberate limitation. It means no cross-device sync without your own backup, and it means the app cannot suggest what to pray next. In exchange, what you wrote last Tuesday is not anywhere else.
What no app can do
It cannot repent for you, and it cannot replace a confessor. The Catechism recommends making the examination of conscience in the light of the Word of God (CCC 1454) — not in the light of a summary of your week.
And if an app makes you anxious rather than clear-eyed, that is information about the app. A review that regularly leaves you frightened has stopped being an Examen; Ignatius' own rules put the guard-rails in exactly there, in the rules for discernment.